Soggy Pizza Night
by drewbug
Summary: Alex sighs. She opens the door and lets him in to drip water all over her carpet.


**Soggy Pizza Night**

* * *

Note: This takes place after the Season3 episode "Mad Hops." There's also a blink-and-you'll-miss-it reference to "A Murderer Among Us" in here too.

* * *

She opens her eyes to the sound of rain pelting her windows and an indeterminate John Wayne western on her tv, and the numbers on her VCR clock are all squiggly red ones. She watches them dance, her brain still fuzzy with interrupted dreams, vaguely registering that she's fallen asleep on her couch again. It's been happening a lot lately, her normal sleep patterns still distorted by the absence of work, by the lingering affects of the pregnancy. The only difference now is that it's a whole lot easier for her to find a comfortable position to lay down in.

That last one flips itself into a two, and a hesitant knocking comes from the other side of her front door.

She runs a hand through her tangling hair, pushing herself to her feet like she's still carrying all that extra weight. Ignoring the light-headed feeling as she stands, she briefly debates going into her bedroom for the gun that's tucked away next to her badge in the top drawer of her nightstand. Not too many Jehovah's Witnesses canvassing the neighborhood after eleven, after all.

She's already half-way across the room before the decision is made not to bother. She might not be entirely awake, but her subconscious still has a pretty good idea of who it must be.

He's looking off down the hallway - the peephole glass making him into a taller, skinnier, fun house mirror version of himself - and he's got a pizza box in one hand. She watches him take a step as if to go. Turn back. Turn away again. She glances down at her sweatpants, her oversized t-shirt. Behind her a cowboy gun battle starts up, popcap explosions competing with the pattering of the rain. Alex sighs. She opens the door and lets him in to drip water all over her carpet.

Which he does. Stopping just inside and no farther, like he's still reserving the right to bolt, his coat sleeve brushing against the edge of the door as she closes it. She's been meaning to call him for days, hasn't talked to him in at least a week; she's not even really sure what case he's working on at the moment. It's an oversight she curses now as she looks him over, dusting off her Bobby Goren Decoder Ring to try and figure out what's going on.

Unnaturally bright eyes dart from her to the floor to the door, looping to an erratic beat. He looks exhausted, but still she can feel the restless energy coming off him like a tangible thing. The hand not shoved deep in his pocket is clutching the pizza box so tightly that the cardboard is denting under his fingers. This isn't a friendly social visit - that much is obvious - but beyond that her decoder ring doesn't seem to be functioning up to its usual standards. She's too far out of the inner circle at the moment.

She pushes aside the ripple of sadness that comes with that thought and works at a tired smile.

"Funny, I don't remember ordering a pizza."

"I woke you," he says quietly, still refusing to consistently meet her eyes. He sounds congested. She reaches out to take the box from him, her hands closing around cold, damp cardboard. He doesn't let go at first, not until she gives the box a little tug.

"You saved me from a sore neck after a night spent on the couch." She walks over to set the pizza on her coffee table, hoping he'll follow. He doesn't. "Believe me - after several months of that, the novelty has definitely worn off."

He frowns. Rubs the back of his own neck. She watches the tiny drops jump off the heavy wool when he lifts his arm.

"No, I shouldn't've... You're supposed to be resting," he says to the back of her head as she moves toward the coat closet.

She snorts, looking for an empty hanger. "I'm not quite that fragile. Besides, I still have another two long weeks to rest. And I'm up now anyway." She grabs a hanger and turns to hand it to him. His eyes are on the floor again.

It's driving her crazy not to know what this is about. Not to be able to ask, for fear of pushing the wrong buttons and scaring him away. It hurts to be this close to him again and yet unexpectedly so far apart.

"Here," she says, offering him the hanger. "Go hang your coat in the bathroom before you soak all the way to the wood and cost me my deposit."

She doesn't miss the fact that his left hand is still buried in his pocket as he leaves the room. Or the way he tries to keep it out of sight when he comes back. She's used to spending the majority of her waking hours watching those hands constantly calling attention to themselves. She wonders who it is exactly that he thinks he's trying to kid.

But she doesn't call him on it - not yet, not with this hazy new veil between them. Instead she sits on the arm of her couch and waits, watching him as the scenarios play out in her head. She wonders just how long it's going to take him to come clean about why he's stopped by. The waiting at least is something she knows, and she settles gratefully into its familiarity.

He's busy studying the titles of books he must've seen twenty times; he's playing the fingers of his visible hand over the lamp base, over wooden shelf corners. He keeps opening his mouth as if about to say something, then snapping it closed again like he's thought better of the idea. He won't look at her. And just watching him is making it hard for her to sit still.

After about five minutes of this, she gets tired of waiting. She seems to remember having a longer attention span than that, but she knows that one of them should really make a move soon and it's looking more and more like it's going to have to be her. Exhaling slowly - and maybe just a little too loudly - she gets up and goes to stand directly in front of him, holding out her hand for his.

He ducks his head and mumbles something about the pizza, making a move as if to get by her. She doesn't even blink, and, unwilling to push past her, he falls awkwardly back on his heels. She can feel the heat coming off him through his damp clothes.

She hates the trapped look in his eyes. She's always hated that look. But she doesn't back down. Sometimes, after all, "partners" means protecting the other person from themself. "No, see - first you show me that hand, _then_ we eat. House rules."

That earns her a brief moment of eye contact and a twitch at the corners of his mouth, but not much else. He glances over her head to the door, over her head to the couch. She keeps her eyes on his face and her body still, making every effort to calm him down through sheer force of will. Sometimes this works. Sometimes it doesn't.

"You're, uh... you're having trouble sleeping," he says. It isn't really a question, nor a particularly good diversion. She shrugs.

"The hand, Bobby." There's another moment of what looks to be protest, a moment where she can actually see him cycling through his remaining options. Then he gives in and rests his big hand in hers. "Jesus," she says, finally getting a good look at the swollen bloody mess where his knuckles used to be.

"Really, it... it isn't anything to be worried about," he says.

She wonders if he's talking about the injury itself or the actions leading up to it. "That why you've been hiding it from me since you got here?"

"Because it looks worse than it is."

"Mmm-hmm." She carefully tilts his hand back and forth, not so much looking at the damage as buying time while she scrambles for a way to approach this. She doesn't really think he'd hit anybody - not without a damn good reason, anyway - but her mind snags on the memory of a dismissed rumor, something about him supposedly confronting a suspect while brandishing a lead pipe. Whispers like that tended to go quiet fast whenever she was around, but she'd heard enough to know there was some confusion as to whether or not there was any actual self-defense involved. On either side.

Alex was just confused as to where the hell _Bishop_ was supposed to have been during all this.

She decides that what they need is more light. "Come on," she tells him, dropping his hand and leading the way into the bathroom. This time he follows, filling the small space. He smells faintly of cigarette smoke. It's something she's noticed now and again during their years together, even though she's never once seen him smoking - every once in a while she'll look up to find him missing, only to be surprised when he returns not with coffee or files but with his coat on. Then he'll pass her something across the desks or lean over her shoulder to point out something on the screen, and she'll catch a hint of that stale cigarette scent. It's never a good sign, that smell. But she never comments on it.

There's dirt in all that blood, and what looks to be concrete dust in some of the abrasions around the edges. He's studying it too now, and if there was latex under her fingers instead of warming living skin, they could almost be at a crime scene. Blood's still fresh. Fingernails clean and unbroken. She half expects him to lift the hand up to his nose and sniff at it, revealing the possibly crucial detail that their vic had pastrami on a soft roll for lunch.

"Here's an idea," she says casually, flipping the tap for the cold water. "Next time you take on a wall, maybe you should try not using your gun hand."

"I'll remember that." He nods like she's given him some kind of valuable information and slips his hand into the running water. He flinches and exhales in a long slow hiss between his teeth, a sound so soft that it disappears into the noise from the faucet. The last time she heard him do that, he was lying on his back on a dirty linoleum floor after taking a bullet to the vest, and she was crouched beside him, trying desperately to sound calmer than she actually felt. This time she ignores both him and the unexpected goosebumps, ducking under his arm to pull her somewhat-depleted first aid kit out from its home beneath the sink.

She sees his eyes slide toward his reflection in the big mirror behind the sink. Sees them dart away. She looks down at the open box on the counter, reminding herself yet again to find some time to make a list of replenishing supplies before she runs out of something she really needs.

He shuts off the water, and Alex sacrifices her last clean towel for the cause. He doesn't want to take it.

"I'll ruin it," he says. Tired and achy, she's suddenly hit with an impulse to simply throw the thing at him and leave him to his own devices.

She doesn't. "Maybe. But it's this or the blowdryer." When he looks as if he might actually be considering it, she pushes the towel into his uninjured hand. "Take it. If it'll make you feel better, you can buy me another one."

She knows he probably will, too. Long after she's forgotten about it, she'll come in one day to find a new towel folded neatly on her desk like some white fluffy rumor marshmallow. She'll smile at him and go to tuck it away in her locker, Ignoring any curious glances or assuming smirks because she knows that when she gets home, this towel with be a perfect match with the rest of her set. A set she herself probably couldn't match on the first try.

His coat is dripping into her bathtub, a steady beat loud in their silence. It's annoying. She roots around in the first aid kit, making more noise than she has to in an effort to block it out. When she looks up again he's watching her, wearing an expression she honestly can't identify. Their eyes meet. He looks away.

"I broke this wrist when I was a kid. Playing basketball." He laughs, but it's a short, unbalanced sort of sound. An inside joke that was never particularly funny. His hand is trembling faintly as she wraps it in the soft gauze, and she wishes she had some dry clothes to offer him. "It was a big game. Important, for the team. But my mother, she... she wasn't doing very well."

He's shifting around, anxious and ready for her to be done. A part of her wants to snap at him, to tell him to hold still. But she doesn't want to cut him off before he says whatever it is he needs to say. He scratches at the back of his head with his free hand. "I didn't want to go. Didn't want to play. But my father, he, uh... he'd promised to be there. I remember thinking that maybe I could get him to come home with me afterward."

She finishes her work and leans against the counter, arms folded across her chest. She watches him inspect the bandaging, wincing when he tries to make a fist. She doesn't want to ask what happened at that game. She can already tell there wasn't a happy ending.

"Jacky Trevino's mom drove me to the hospital," he says, looking down at his hand with a sad half-smile. "She wanted to stay, but Jacky - Jacky didn't. Finally I told her that I had gotten ahold of my dad, that he was coming to pick me up, and then I took the bus home. By the time he showed up... a few days later... I'd already quit the team."

She feels like she's supposed to understand what this is all about. Supposed to know how this dysfunctional family snapshot ties in with whatever catalyst brought him over here tonight. But she doesn't have enough information, and she fears that to ask will reveal her as less than what he needs her to be.

"Mark ofa boy with an indifferent father," he says under his breath, turning to grab the edge of the sink with both hands.

She looks at his hunched shoulders, his bowed head, and fights back an irrational surge of anger at her red-headed replacement. If she'd been there, things never would've gotten so -

But she's here now. And she can't seem to do anything either.

_Drip. _

_Drip. _

_Drip._

She thinks back to the few more recent times she had contact with anybody back at the station. About the way Deakins was careful not to tell her too much about what was going on with her partner. About the way she was careful not ask too much on her own. It makes her feel vaguely sick now, and she wishes she still had the pregnancy to blame her nausea on.

He tenses when she puts her hand on his shoulder; she keeps it there as she feels him relax. He lifts his head and finds her eyes in the mirror, moistening his lips with his tongue. "It's... different without you, Eames." Another humourless laugh. "I mean, I - I didn't expect it to be the _same_, but... It's different."He lets go of the sink just enough to wave a hand through the air, as if he can explain things better with invisible pictures. "She's different."

She takes a moment to let the sentiment settle on her skin. Then she smirks at him and says, "And if the next words out of your mouth are, 'She makes better coffee than you,' you're not getting any of my soggy pizza."

A genuine smile breaks across his face, and, for the first time since seeing her nephew snuggled safe in her sister's arms, Alex feels like she's right where she's supposed to be.

"It's only another two weeks," she says. He nods.

But he looks like he doesn't quite believe her.

**end.**


End file.
